Advanced Kodi tips & tricks
Want to progress beyond your vanilla Kodi knowledge? Nick Peers can show you a thing or two.
When it comes to consuming media on your PC — be it movies, photos, home video or music — there’s no substitute for Kodi. It’s equally at home providing you with a big-screenfriendly interface for locally stored content as it is streaming media over the internet. You can, with the right help (as in this feature), even use it as a front end for playing classic games from yesteryear.
The basics of Kodi are reasonably straightforward. Point it to your local music, movie and picture folders, and you’re good to go. That said, the user interface does come with a bit of a learning curve attached, and some of its best features are buried away behind seemingly impenetrable dialogs and settings. This, however, is where we come in.
We’re going to skip the basics — adding a media folder to your library isn’t rocket science, thankfully — and dig deep beneath Kodi’s surface to reveal some of its best kept secrets. Everything from changing library view to auto-starting add-ons, and using Kodi as an Airplay audio receiver is covered here. Oh, and we’ll show you how to name and organise your media library so Kodi’s scrapers can download all that gorgeous artwork and extra info, too.
EXPAND YOUR LIBRARIES
The quickest way to manage your library — and add new content (including music) — is to open Settings, and browse to ‘Media Settings’. From the Library section, click your chosen library — videos, music or pictures — under Sources, and click the Add option to add another folder to your library. Remember to name your media correctly — head over to www.filebot.net, to grab a handy tool to help you with this.
>> While you’re in the Library section, you can periodically clean your video or music libraries to remove files that have been renamed, deleted or stored on a drive no longer connected to your PC, but to do this, you must first click the ‘Standard’ setting at the bottom of the screen in order to switch to ‘Advanced’, and reveal the cleaning options.
>> If you’d like to streamline your movie library, navigate to the Videos section, and flick the ‘Show movie sets’ button to on. Now all the movies in a specific series (such as Star Trek, Star Trek II, and so on) are grouped together [ Image A] — click the main entry to drill down to browse and play each individual movie.
TWEAK MUSIC INFO
Got an obscure album the default music scraper can’t identify? Go to ‘Media Settings > Music’ and click the ‘Default provider’ option for album or artist information, then click ‘Get more...’ to pick from a range of alternatives. And if your music has been tagged, but you’d prefer to use the information provided by your music scraper, make sure you switch to Advanced view, and flick the ‘Prefer online information’ switch to on.
CONFIGURE LIVE TV
If you’ve set up live TV on your PC (or indeed any PC on your network) using TVheadend or a similar service, select TV from the main Kodi menu, and choose ‘Enter add-on browser’. Locate and select your chosen PVR server, then click Configure to set up access (for example, to connect to a remote PVR server, enter its IP address and PIN access code). Click Enable and press Esc to go back to the main screen.
>> You’ll see several widgets under ‘TV’, making it easy for you to access the TV guide and previous recordings, as well as browse live TV (and radio) by clicking the remote, and choosing which channel to watch. If you’ve previously found Kodi unwieldy with live TV, now’s a great time to try it again — you’ll find the latest update has made it easier and more responsive, even when streaming over your network.
CONFIGURE GAMEPAD
If you’re using Kodi on your gaming rig, why not use your gamepad to navigate? To set things up, simply press a button on your gamepad while Kodi is running, and it should ask if you want to configure it [ Image B] (or you can go to ‘Settings > System Settings > Input > Configure attached controllers’, if you prefer).
>> You’ll see a default configuration — Kodi — is present. You can manually link the controls on your gamepad by clicking the buttons on the right, and following the instructions, at which point, your controller should work. While you’re here, why not flick the ‘Enable rumble for notifications’ switch to on?
CONFIGURE KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS
It’s worth familiarising yourself with Kodi’s keyboard shortcuts. There are the playback controls, for example: P to play, X to stop, left/right arrow keys to skip back or forward 30 seconds, or R/F to rewind and fast forward — press once for 2x, then keep pressing to speed up. Or press the backslash (\) key to move between windowed and full-screen mode.
>> All well and good, but what if you don’t like the keyboard shortcuts Kodi has picked, or you’d like to configure some more of your own? From the home screen, select ‘Add-ons’ and click ‘Enter add-on browser’. Click ‘...’ if necessary to return to the main screen, then choose ‘Program add-ons’ and scroll down to locate and install the Keymap Editor. Once done, click Run and choose Edit
to review current shortcuts and define your own, using both your keyboard and your game controller buttons.
ADD A REMOTE
If you’ve set up Kodi in your living room, you don’t want to have to use a keyboard or mouse to control it. If the game controller option doesn’t appeal, simply turn your cell phone (Android or iOS) into a fully functional remote. First, you need to configure Kodi: Navigate to ‘Settings > Service settings > Control’ and enable ‘Allow remote control via HTTP’. Enter a username and password for security reasons — you’ll need this later to set up the connection with your cell phone. Also, flick the ‘Allow remote control from applications on other systems’ switch to on, and if you’ve not already done so, switch on ‘Announce services to other systems’ under General.
>> Next, install either Kore (Android) or Official Kodi Remote (iOS) from the appropriate app store. iOS users can open it, tap ‘Add Host’, followed by ‘Find Kodi’. Enter your username and password, then tap Save to hopefully make contact and take control.
A CHANGE OF SKIN
Kodi 17 defaults to the Estuary skin, a big-screen-friendly skin that still lacks a little oomph. If you’re running Kodi on a touchscreen device, we recommend going to ‘Settings > Interface Settings’ and clicking Skin [ Image C] to switch to Estouchy instead — it’s a similar skin to Estuary, but optimised for touchscreen devices (short tap to select, long tap to bring up the context menu for an item).
>> Alternatively, click ‘Get more...’ to choose from over 20 more. Pining for the look of previous versions, for example? Confluence is still an option (or try Aeon Flux for a more updated approach). Visit kodi.tv/addons/look-and
feel/skins for a better view of how each skin looks without having to install it.
FURTHER CUSTOMISATIONS
Once you’ve installed your new skin, you can tweak it further from the same Skin menu — change its theme to try a different colour scheme, for example, or tweak the fonts to your personal choice. Select ‘Configure Skin’ and you skip to the ‘Settings > Skin’ menu, where more granular changes can be made, such as picking a different background image or pattern, selecting which libraries and other items (such as live TV) to show on
the main screen, or choosing how much detail about each media item is displayed. Options vary from skin to skin — and don’t always appear in the same place, so be prepared to dig deep to find them.
POWER-SAVING SETTINGS
If you’ve hooked up Kodi to your living-room TV — perhaps through a dedicated computer (see boxout section on previous page) — you should take measures to configure power-saving to both protect your TV and reduce energy consumption. To do this, go to ‘Settings > Power saving’ and click the up arrow next to ‘Put display to sleep when idle’, to set a delay of five minutes — you can increase this all the way to 120 minutes, if you’d prefer, but a 5 or 10-minute delay is usually best.
>> If you’d like to power off Kodi after a set period, switch to Advanced or Expert view, then set ‘Shutdown function’ to one of ‘Shutdown’, ‘Hibernate’ or ‘Suspend’, before setting the ‘Shutdown function timer’ to a delay — again between 5 and 120 minutes — based on inactivity.
MAKE KODI AN AIRPLAY RECEIVER
The following feature can be troublesome to set up — and frequently breaks between updates — but if you would like to stream audio from your iPhone or iPad to your PC or TV’s speakers, give it a go. First, if you don’t have iTunes installed on your PC, install Apple Bonjour from support.apple.com/ kb/dl999, then go into Kodi, and navigate to ‘Settings > Service Settings > General’ to enable Zeroconf, and review your ‘Device name’, which is how Kodi will advertise itself on your iOS device when detected.
Now select AirPlay and flick the ‘Enable AirPlay support’ switch to on. Switch to Expert and you’ll see a new option appear: Enable AirPlay ‘Videos’ and ‘Pictures’ support [ Image D]. This needs to be switched off for AirPlay to work with devices running iOS 9.0 or later. Once done, you should find Kodi appear in the list of AirPlay devices on your iOS devices.
ADD ADD-ON REPOSITORIES
Some of the best Kodi add-ons aren’t bundled with the official repositories (repos) — to get those, you need to install additional repos. This is slightly fiddly, but once you know how, it’s reasonably straightforward. For the following example, we’re going to add the Fusion repo.
>> First, go to ‘Settings > System > Add-ons’. Flick the ‘Unknown sources’ switch to on, and make a note of the warning. Next, go to ‘Settings > File Manager’. Double-click ‘Add Source’ on the left, then click ‘None’ to bring up the virtual keyboard (which you can ignore). Type the following web address, and click OK: http://fusion.tvaddons.ag
>> Name the source “Fusion” and click OK. Next, return to the home screen and click ‘Add-ons’. Click the box icon in the top-left, and choose ‘Install from zip file’. Scroll down, and select ‘Fusion’ from the list, then browse to “kodi repos\english,” where you’ll see a host of available repos to choose from. Select a zip file, and click OK to add that repo to your list. Now, when you open ‘Add-ons > Download’, you’ll find additional add-on choices in each category.
Third-party repos are by their nature risky, and can contain dangerous material (see kodi.wiki/view/ Banned_add-on for a list of so-called “banned” repos — Fusion is one of these). If you decide a repo isn’t for you, remove it. Go to ‘Add-ons > My add-ons > Add-on repository’. Click the unwanted repo to bring up its window (you can configure its update settings from here, too — for example, switch between auto and manual updates). To remove it completely, click Uninstall, then close and restart Kodi.
AUTOSTART ADD-ONS
Here’s the scenario: we’ve got a Raspberry Pi set up to exclusively run the Plex add-on in Kodi. We want to autostart Plex with Kodi to save the hassle of manually accessing it from the main menu. You can autostart add-ons using a script, but a simpler way is to use the Partymode Autostart add-on [ Image E].
>> Add your add-on to the Favorites menu: Browse to ‘Add-ons’, then locate your add-on (Plex in our example). Right-click it and choose ‘Add to Favorites’. Go back to the main Add-ons screen and choose ‘Downloads > Services’, where you’ll find ‘Partymode Autostart’. Once installed, right-click it, and choose ‘Settings’.
>> Under ‘Main’, enable it to ‘Run on Startup’ and reduce the delay to 0 seconds. Make sure ‘Run on Screensaver’ and ‘Run on Playlist’ are disabled, then scroll down and enable ‘Run on Favorites’, before clicking ‘Select from Favorites’ to choose your add-on. Click OK, exit and restart Kodi. The normal menu should briefly appear, but then your add-on should kick in. Job done!
MULTIPLE PROFILES
This tip will appeal more to those who use Kodi on a shared device, such as a Pi connected to your TV. Go to ‘Settings > Profile Settings > Profiles’ [ Image F]. Click ‘Add profile’. Type a name and click OK. Leave the profile directory as it is (click OK again), then choose whether this profile shares the same media library as the default user (choose the read-only option to stop people from modifying the library), as well as its media sources, then click OK. You can then opt to copy settings across from the default user or let them start from scratch.
LOCK DOWN PROFILES
You may not want your users to be able to tweak settings, in which case, select the profile lock option, and — if necessary — set a profile lock password when prompted: either a numeric PIN, a full-text password or even a gamepad button combo. Make your choice, then choose what parts of Kodi to lock (effectively disabling them), from libraries (music, videos, pictures, programs & scripts) to the file manager, settings and add-on manager. When locking settings, you can allow users to access some settings by choosing a level (standard, advanced, or expert).